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[–] 132 points 4 months ago (1 child)

I will not ignore the cat pic, in fact I enjoyed it, tyvm.

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  • [–] 82 points 4 months ago (1 child)
  • [–] 52 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    Does the cat use Arch, BTW?

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  • [–] 93 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    Fun fact: cats use arch all the time, btw

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    How is there not an Arch-derived distro that uses a cat in the shape of the Arch logo for their logo?

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  • [–] 32 points 4 months ago* (4 children)

    Didn't valve test this sort of thing over a decade ago and found Linux to easily get better performance?

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  • [–] 20 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    Yes.

    Kind of.

    Its... why they spent that decade making Proton, and now basically have an OS based off of it.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)
  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    I mean literally yes, but, it could not exist in any meaningful way without Proton.

    Thats why I say its really built around Proton, they started with Proton and then said 'how do we make an OS that will work with/around this' and landed on Arch.

    The whole point of it is: Be a functional, efficient, fast, Linux OS that primarily plays video games.

    Thats impossible without Proton.

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  • [–] 27 points 4 months ago

    I will not ignore the cat.

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  • [–] 23 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    I will ignore everything but the cat. I demand more pics of the cat.

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  • [–] 38 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    In many games it does, but I'm not sure this comparison is a good example of that, as it shows persistent CPU stutter on Linux. With those spikes, Windows would be the smoother experience even if the average frametimes are slightly better on Linux.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    As I... think has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread, you can run Gamescope + Proton + Wayland, and force the refresh rate.

    You can do this with xrandr or sometimes some games actually expose it as a thing you can directly configure.

    Presumably, you could set this to, for this example, 90, and probably help out the frame timing variance a bit.

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago

    Irrelevant cat picture to get people to read the post works every time.

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  • [–] 15 points 4 months ago

    I feel like people don't believe me when I tell them this is the case. Always glad to see evidence.

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  • [–] 14 points 4 months ago

    Appreciate the cat image.

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  • [–] 13 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    ITT: OP learns why reviewers take days to provide benchmarks for games. If you don't come with receipts, it's death by a thousand buts.

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  • [–] 22 points 4 months ago

    I once posted on /r/MacGaming how pleased I was that I could run Horizon Zero Dawn on my M2 Air using Crossover, and how it seemed (to me) to run better than on my massive, old, water-cooled PC with an Nvidia GTX1060. I wasn't getting 120fps or anything, in fact, it was closer to 20fps at times. But I was running HZD on a fanless laptop, on an architecture on which it was never designed to run.

    Foolishly, I was expecting a chorus of folks saying "yeah, cool, nice!", but what I actually got were a bunch of folks demanding proof.

    So I closed Reddit, because it wasn't worth the arsehole.

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  • [–] 24 points 4 months ago

    Ignores the post, read the cat

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago

    Impressive.

    Very nice.

    ...

    Now... lets see Paul Allens cat.

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  • [–] 12 points 4 months ago

    Really needed that cat pick today. Also always cool to see Linux kicking butt

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    I will not ignore

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  • [–] 11 points 4 months ago

    Doesn't seem to happen going by the graphs included, but one thing I look in benchmarks is not how fast or not a program was, but how frequent spikes and hiccups in speed are. Having played games at 11 FPS but that were consistent at that and seemingly weren't lagging (variable max fps?), big numbers don't tell much imo.

    Also, statistically, one single benchmark, and from an unamed game at that, doesn't tell much either. If I might suggest, maybe do like the microblogging folks and start a responses/quoting thread of more tests?

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  • [–] 10 points 4 months ago

    I shan’t ignore the cat!

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago
    [–] 6 points 4 months ago

    Ignore the cat pic? Why did you add it?

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago*

    "Ignore the cat pic"
    How???

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago*

    Sometimes, you can get similar benefits on Windows running DXVK.

    Some older DX9/OpenGL games like it in particular.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (23 children)

    Cool cool. Now if only linux worked on my PC. Tried like 6 distros and each had their own issues preventing me from playing games.

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  • [–] 7 points 4 months ago (20 children)

    Kind of curious about the hardware, because this seems kind of unlikely.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (19 children)

    Ryzen 7 5800x with 32GB ram and a rtx3070.

    Some systems failed to install or failed to complete the setup after installing. While others did technically work but the experience was just bad. Most games I tried ran like shit conpared to win11.

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  • [–] 4 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    I would be willing to help you.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (7 children)

    I mean idk what to try anymore. I use Fedora on my laptop so I might try that again but I had issues where I could not get through the setup after installing.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (6 children)

    What kind of weird issues? Did it finish the install and boot from the drive, or did you not get past the live environment?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (5 children)

    It booted fine and after setting up username password all that I got stuck on timezone selection. I could move my mouse and click on stuff but nothing would happen. I tried skipping it or exiting the setup, even rebooting did nothing. I just could not get past the timezone selection.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    Oh thats because you forgot the pentagram of lit candles around the computer. Friggin’ noob.

    But really though the only thing I can think of is that you are running your own NTP server that you forgot about and it’s having a bad time?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (2 children)

    That...is strange. What specific flavor of Fedora was that?

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Basic fedora workstation with Gnome. Literally went with the same I used on my laptop because I am familiar with it

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (9 children)

    Hows your hardware?

    Memtest your RAM?

    HDD or SSD? How old are they, they got any problems?

    If you keep hitting problems on connecting to timezone, it might be your wifi chip / card, could be that its an odd duck that still has driver quirks on linux, + is maybe physically damaged... could lead to a lot of nonsense if you are actually grabbing malformed core files from a not fully offline install.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (8 children)

    Hardware's fine I think. Using a 4th gen m.2 no real issues and most pf the stuff is about 6 years old. The only distro I had timezone issues with was Fedora

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (7 children)

    Ok so 'I think' is not the same as 'yes I tested it and I know'.

    But anyway... yeah you'd have to give a more detailed description of... well, pick one particular attempt at an OS install, and specifically describe what did or did not work, with that one.

    I'm not trying to be an ass, but its basically impossible to troubleshoot when the info you have is 'i tried a bunch of things and they all didn't work in different ways'.

    Gotta be able to go through an actual diagnosis of a defined scenario.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (5 children)

    I know. Well I never tested stuff because apart from shit nvidia drivers I never had issues on windows. What would you like me to test anyway? Memtest or give some suggestions.

    The only real tangible issue was the one I mentioned on fedora with the timezone selection issue. All the other distros either did nowlt want to install or just had general performance issues either in the DE or just in games. Especially the 2 games I really only care about. Squad 44 and War thunder (the only ones I actually play) both ran like shit on all the distros I tried (bazzite, nobara, debian, cachyOS)

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

    Well... ok, let me try to respond broadly, first, then more narrowly, second.

    Nvidia drivers are also shit on Linux.

    To install Nvidia drivers on Linux, you actually have to install an entire custom kernel, much of which is propietary, not open source, other people cannot see the actual code.

    This means that you basically have to pick a particular Nvidia driver/kernel, and build a Linux OS around it... with the added difficulty of... if Nvidia updates its drivers, well now the OS has to check literally every possible thing they could have changed, while not being able to directly see those things that may or may not have changed.

    This... is significantly harder to do to a 100% OS stability/functionality assured level... than with AMD, who open sources their entire Linux drivers.

    (I am not sure what the status is here for Intel GPUs)

    So, yeah, basically, a shitty broken Nvidia driver update, on Linux, in comparison to Windows, has the additional capacity to potentially break literally all of your OS.


    There is an open source version of Nvidia drivers, the Nouveau drivers, that are much more broadly compatible with various Linux distros... but its basically unofficial, a bunch of people trying to reverse engineer the official, blackbox, propietary Nvidia drivers.

    So... it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.

    There's a good write up on this here, if you eant more details:

    https://machaddr.substack.com/p/nouveau-vs-nvidia-the-battle-between


    So, IMO, a more sane approach than just going bleeding edge with your Nvidia driver/kernel, is to use an OS that semi-regularly rebases itself around the latest stable Nvidia driver/kernel.

    Of the OSs you listed, Bazzite is the most straight forward and also reliable, in that way.

    Debian is exceedingly stable, but, requires you to learn learn how to use it properly... you have to find an Nvidia driver/kernel that is basically compatible with your version of Debian, then stick with that untill Debian does a full new version of itself, about once a year I think.

    Nobara and Cachy are basically bleeding edge; more frequent updates to latest Nvidia versions, but also this means greater chance something breaks and doesn't get noticed or fixed for a bit.


    Now to try to be more specific:

    When you say you only ran into timezone issues on 'fedora', do you mean standard mainline fedora?

    Or does that include Nobara and Bazzite? They are both based on Fedora, basically customized versions of Fedora.

    You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point... I haven't kept up.

    (Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)

    So anyway... both of those use kernel level anticheat.

    Kernel level anticheat tends to not play super well with Linux. Because... well now we have another thing fucking with the kernel, in addition to Nvidia!

    Another thing that is not open source, that is a black box, that works in ways other people don't know about, and can again change something rather important, which can potentially break a lot of other things.

    It is hard to build an OS around kernel cores when the kernel itself is a mystery to those designing the OS.

    While Squad proper implements EAC in a way that does work on Linux, Squad 44 doesn't appear to. So, Offworld would have to... do that.

    WarThunder on the other hand implements BattleEye in a way that works on Linux, but my guess would be they have not prioritized optimizing it much.

    I dunno, what uh... what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs ... same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    So… it usually significantly lags behind the propietary drivers in terms of up to date features and optimization and newer game support.

    That would not be an issue for me I don't think. I am literally running 2 year old drivers on win11 rn because anything never has been vibe coded by nvidia and my games literally started crashing and my PC would just stop outputing video signal on newer drivers. (went back and it fixed it).

    When you say you only ran into timezone issues on ‘fedora’, do you mean standard mainline fedora?

    Yeah I meant fedora workstation (44 I think) with Gnome. I had no ikssues with nobara and bazzite apart from bad performance and not liking the way they do updates and some other minor things (mainly preferences not really dealbreaking)

    You also say your main use case concern here is WarThunder and Squad 44, the latter I think meaning the WW2 submod of Squad? Or is it actuslly a fully distinct game at this point… I haven’t kept up.

    (Ah, apparently it is its own thing now!)

    It was a mod for squad that got spun into its own game called Post Scriptum that was then later abandoned, reaquired by offworld, rebranded, handed off to the devs of one of the biggest mods that got officially integrated and now seemingly is abandoned again.

    I dunno, what uh… what kinds of frame rate and such differences were you getting on which OS and which gfx settings vs … same gfx settings on Win10 or Win11?

    I was using same or lower settings as win11 and getting less than half the frames with really bad stutters. I even ran a little experiment with WT on my laptop. On win10/11 I could run the game at 80 fps on low settings on an intel Iris XE iGPU. The same laptop running fedora 44 and the native linux version of WT (that actually exists surprisingly) could barely run the game on ultra low graphics (old videocard support) at around 50-60fps with inconsistent frametimes and sometimes bad stutters with the game often freezing for 2 seconds upon entering a match.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

    Ah thank you for the history update on Squad and related things!

    Once upon a time, I was one of the first, fairly long term beta testers for Project Reality... waaaaay back when it was just a mod for BF2, before something like half the team formed into OffWorld, made Squad.

    I distinctly remember basically reverse engineering one testing session... that dbzao had made a simple character handling mistske that was breaking the entire kit/squad system, before the 0.5 release. Basically, he forgot that player names can have non-alphanumeric characters in them. Any time they did, those players could request infinite numbers of any kit, probably because somewhere, he wasn't handling strings properly in python.

    He screamed curses i did not understand, when he double checked the code and realized that simple mistake had been the last blocker for the 0.5 release, lol.


    As to your pc/game performance... you could find and run... some linux distro, that is built around a kernel from around the same time as your last good/stable Nvidia drivers on Windows.

    It might be that Nvidia just fundamentally fucked their drivers for older cards, and carried that forward into Linux as well, where with your hardware, its... even more fucked, basically.

    Looks like that would be... either R535 ot R550?

    Which... I think means that you want to find a Linux distro that is based around v6.15 or lower of the Linux kernel.

    Which I think would give you potentially better performing on your hardware distros of:

    Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

    Debian Stable 12 'Bookworm'

    Fedora 38, 39, 40

    Arch-LTS

    Linux Mint 22

    PopOS! 22.04 LTS

    ... there are probably more options than this, there are... /a lot/ of linux distros.

    But yeah, unfortunately in your case, most 'gaming oriented' distros use a pretty modern Kernel, to be able to support more modern gaming hardware. Some of them may offer a kind of LTS/legacy variant of themselves, but I'm not aware of any off the top of my head.

    You having older hardware, but still quite gaming capable... yeah, probably go with one from that list above, and ... it might/should work better?

    Nvidia will probably yell at you to force you to upgrade your kernel if you just try and do things their 'normal' way for their linux drivers... so... you may have to figure out a specific way to get a specific kernel compatible version of the linux drivers installed.

    Because if you let the normal Nvidia drivers... jump your kernel to a new version... on an older or LTS distro... that will basicslly break most or all of your OS.

    Here's Nvidia's extremely user friendly linux driver archive:

    x86_64:

    https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/

    Arch64:

    https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-aarch64/

    Alternatively... you might just try the Nouveau drivers. You having a 30 series GPU... I think Nouveau should work at least decently well, as... their shit works much more reliably on hardware that has been around longer, though you'd likely lose DLSS and FrameGen and such.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Nouveau drivers should work with newer kernels or what? Because honestly I could not give a shit about dlss and such stuff. Pure raster for me please

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago*

    Basically yes, Nouveau drivers should work with basically any kernel... I think. Its been years since I tried to run linux on an nvidia GPU, but basically they should work.

    No clue how they will performance compare to Windows though... every body I'm aware of that does detailed linux gaming benchmarks, they don't use Nouveau, because AI UpSlaLInG! Cutting edge graphics!

    But yes, try Nouveau, might work for your situation.

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  • [–] 3 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    I'm not exactly playing anything new but I've been playing Grounded (the first one) on Window for like 2 months. My computer was so hot it was warming up my entire room.

    I switched to Linux due to other Microsoft issues and decided to give it another shot. Man, my computer doesn't really get warm at all. Like yeah I can see the temp monitor change a little bit but not much. There's no hot air pouring out of my PC. I'm not sweating sitting next to it.

    I've made no changes to any game settings (other than using proton) or hardware changes. It's an insane difference.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (3 children)

    I love Vulkan so much. Having everything precompiled ahead of time is probably a big contributing factor on why your machine is running cooler. It's just pulling from the shader cache instead of doing on the fly computation for shaders.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    That makes sense. I'm still new to all this so I'm kinda learning as I go.

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    The long and short of it is that Vulkan and other modern graphics APIs are extremely explicit. As the game developer, you tell the GPU exactly what resources are being used, when they're available, and how work is synchronized. Once you've built those command buffers, the driver mostly just submits them to the hardware "fire and forget" style basically.

    Older APIs like OpenGL and Direct3D 11 were much higher level. You described what you wanted to draw, and the graphics driver figured out resource transitions, synchronization, and a lot of the scheduling behind the scenes. That made them easier to use but also added CPU overhead and made performance less predictable.

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Oh wow, wonder why that is! Microslop is only here to slowly but surely make your computer a slave to their system, Linux along with pretty much all FOSS are here to keep your computer yours (some exceptions sadly exist)

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  • [–] 2 points 4 months ago

    Now if only I don't have to compile vulkan shaders every time I try to start deadlock

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  • [–] -3 points 4 months ago* (1 child)

    How much did you do to optimize on both systems beyond the in-game settings?

    Most Linux benchmarks I see have a completely stripped down version of Linux and a bloated version of Windows with tons of running background services just to get similar performance.

    And those stutters are a much bigger problem than the 6fps gain.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago (2 children)

    How does it handle ray tracing?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    how does anything handle raytracing? I watched a friend with a 5090 show off his bullshit money rig and maybe it was a 4k monitor or something, I didn't check, but it wasn't performant enough to impress me at that price range. Its probably also lack of optimization and nobody ever leaving the default unreal engine visuals.

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  • [–] -1 points 4 months ago*

    Just living in an alternate reality here.

    My 4090 handles cyberpunk 4k with path tracing at 120+ FPS.

    Linux is objectively inferior when it comes to high fidelity gaming and it very clearly triggers some linux nerds.

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